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(Image via CrunchBase)

Is real-time purchase-to-delivery about to hit the living room?

EBay, Wal-Mart, and Amazon are lining up for the first stages of that race, and regardless of who wins, the competition is triggering the next big wave of significant change in retailing and customer engagement.

It's an ideal to which the retail world has long aspired: a few years ago, Walgreen’s launched a series of playful but compelling TV ads that depicted store employees, replete in their classic blue vests, functioning within consumers’ homes as invisible, real-time supply-chain agents.

When Fido fidgetingly demanding his mid-day chow, a crisis was averted as an empty sack of dog food was replaced just-in-time by a stealth Walgreen’s employee hidden at the very back of the cupboard. When the woman of the house was shampooing her hair and had suds in her eyes and couldn’t find the conditioner, the just-in-time Walgreen’s employee surreptitiously slipped a fresh bottle into the shower (with eyes demurely averted, of course).

While the retail-consumer connection might not yet be quite that sophisticated, the concept expressed by Walgreen’s is coming much closer to reality as three powerhouse retailers—Wal-Mart, Amazon, and eBay—have all launched or expanded same-day delivery trials across the country.

While each of these trailblazing companies has its own unique approach to the emergent phenomenon, the common thread is the need for speed in today’s modern world as consumers expectations rise, their mobile-powered scope of information and access increases, and new technologies give retailers the ability to move at speeds never before possible.

As the Wall Street Journal recently reported, “In its latest bid to take on Internet powerhouse Amazon.com Inc. this holiday season, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is promising same-day delivery in some cities for orders placed online…. Over the past several years, Wal-Mart has launched several attacks on its online rival, including a price war over best-selling books three years ago.”

And one day later, the Journal followed up with an article describing two moves from eBay designed to keep pace with what’s likely to become not only a retail-industry standard, but also a consumer-expectation standard that will, sometime in the not-too-distant future, have to be topped.

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“EBay has been experimenting with ways to bring in new users, including same-day delivery and a new global shipping program, to help it play catch-up to industry giant Amazon.com Inc. and fend off a number of upstarts,” the Journal article says. “Among the new features on eBay's site is a checkout process that takes only one click after a shopper decides to buy, three fewer than currently.”

Each of these examples underscores a powerful trend impacting all industries today, and I mentioned it above as “the need for speed.” More than just some dopey rhyme, this renewed focus on faster thinking, faster development, faster decision-making, and faster response time is becoming a primary source of competitive advantage in our intensely interconnected world.

As such, it’s incumbent on CIOs to seize this opportunity to help their companies accelerate processes, reduce or eliminate latency wherever possible, and aspire to deliver real-time insights whenever and wherever possible.

Indeed, that’s precisely why the notion of “CIO as Chief Acceleration Officer” is featured prominently in my recent list of The Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues for 2013. Here’s an excerpt from that Top 10 list about the CIO as the catalyst for acceleration across the enterprise: “If you could promise your CEO that you could shorten product-development times, reduce days-of-inventory turns, accelerate deliveries to customers, cut or eliminate the wait-times customers endure on your support lines, and shorten your order-to-cash cycle, is there a CEO on planet Earth who wouldn’t idolize you?”